Stranger at the Gates

Book excerpt: Louise de Bernard’s long-ago past in Nazi-occupied France comes back to haunt her when a woman shows up on her doorstep demanding payback On a tranquil tree-lined street in Paris, a woman exits a taxi. She has come from Bonn, Germany, on a mission of desperation and revenge. And in a house on the Rue de Varenne, a wife and mother is about to relive the past she thought she’d left far behind. In 1944, in Nazi-occupied France, circumstances forced Jean de Bernard and his wife to put up a German officer at their isolated chateau in St. Blaize. The American-born Louise de Bernard despised Major Heinz Minden—and her husband even more for collaborating with the Germans when their tanks first rumbled through their centuries-old village. Into this seething hotbed of betrayal and brutality, Roger Savage arrives. The undercover Allied agent recruits Louise to help him destroy a lethal nerve gas the Germans are secretly manufacturing nearby. But now a high-ranking Nazi general is dead, and an entire village is about to be punished in the most merciless and horrifying way. Culminating in post-war Germany as an SS officer prepares to stand trial for wartime atrocities, Stranger at the Gates is a spine-tingling page-turner about family and sacrifice, loyalty and love, and how ordinary people can become heroes.